VP Debate: Roe v. Ryan, Even Worse Than You Thought

Most of the self-proclaimed "independent" — or, if you prefer, "undecided" voters — are simpletons who probably have to hire someone to cut their oatmeal into tiny chunks every morning so that they don't choke to death, and also have to explain to them that the raisins are not tiny landmines that will detonate in their mouths and destroy their molars.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

If you believe that Thursday night's vice-presidential debate was a "draw" because Joe Biden was "rude" and "disrespectful" while Paul Ryan was obviously being disingenuous and uninformed, or that you've decided to go with "disingenuous" and "uninformed" because its manners made it more "likable," then you deserve the inadequate health-care voucher that's coming your way in 2014, as well as the letter from the Social Security Administration that your benefits will be down to 85 cents a month because International Embezzlement LLC went belly-up and took your retirement with it. Tough luck, kids. Them's the risks of an Opportunity Society.

More From Esquire

Bear in mind: A lot of the elite media was pitching this line of, yes, malarkey while the debate was in progress. David Gregory was on the magic Twitter machine, telling us that his "moderate" acquaintances were wondering about Biden's demeanor. And Luke Russert was being, well, Luke Russert, which is to say somebody who ought to be filing his dispatches every day in Colorforms.

As I pointed out earlier, the actual news in this debate was Biden's ability to make Paul Ryan own his earlier, extremist self on everything from Social Security to a woman's right to choose. Going back over the transcript, on the latter issue, I find that Ryan was even worse than I thought....

RYAN: We don't think that unelected judges should make this decision; that people through their elected representatives in reaching a consensus in society through the democratic process should make this determination.

I may be wrong here, or I may still be distracted by Joe Biden's laughter, but I think that the zombie-eyed granny-starver here is professing his belief that the involvement of the courts in this issue — up to and including the involvement of the United States Supreme Court — is (and always has been) fundamentally illegitimate. This is the position of the very far fringe of the anti-choice movement, the point at which that movement connects with the Tenthers and the whole rest of extreme right opinion on the judiciary. This is where the argument goes beyond whether the right to choose is grounded in the Constitution or not to a place where the involvement of the courts in making that decision is in and of itself illegitimate. Push that far enough, and you get people with their heads glued to clinics and doctors shot down in their kitchens. And in case the audience he was pitching didn't get the point, Ryan added a wink and a nod to constitutional conservatism — look, Glenn Beck's dog just perked up its ears! — later on.

But the other guy laughed, so, ladies, don't worry, you can always fly to Sweden to buy your ladyparts medicines.